There are no shortage of whispers out there right now as to what Facebook’s plans for location are. With rival Twitter having recently announced its geolocation API, the pressure is on the larger network to deliver something. Tomorrow will bring a step in that direction, as Nokia will announce a new service at its Nokia World event that will utilize location within Facebook, we’ve learned.

Now, to be clear, this is not Facebook officially getting into the game itself yet, but it’s big enough that Henri Moissinac, Facebook’s director of mobile, will apparently be using his keynote address at Nokia World to unveil this, we’ve heard.

The app looks to be a direct result of the Nokia purchase of the location-based social network Plazes, in the summer of 2008. As you can see in the screenshot below, an Ovi Map (Nokia’s map property) will reside inside of Facebook and show where you are. It can also update your Facebook status with your location, and a link to it on one of these maps.

Other services such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Whrrl have applications to set your location within Facebook, but those are still rather cumbersome to use, and haven’t taken off within Facebook. Presumably, this Nokia announcement would also be tied into its mobile devices, which could get it access to millions of users right off the bat.

It’s also interesting that this Nokia/Facebook concept appears to work around “checking-in” places, which is what services like Foursquare (and Plazes before it), use for location. That’s different from something like Google Latitude or Loopt, which simply track your location.

At some point, Facebook is going to have to get off the bench and throw its considerable weight into the location-based services arena itself. That’s definitely happening, we’ve heard from many sources, but the question is, when? For now, partnerships will have to do.

We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with the everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.

In fact, millions of people are already doing so every time they upload a geo-coded photo to Flickr, add a review to Yelp, Tweet about a specific place, or use any of the dozens of geo-aware social apps springing up all over the place. They are not just tagging the world with keywords, they are commenting on it and annotating it in tiny little bursts. To get a sense of what some of this activity looks like, check out Twittervision or Flickrvision, which show Tweets and Flickr photos, respectively, on a map as they are posted to the Web.

Services such as Plazes (now owned by Nokia), Brightkite, and Nokia’s new Friend View app all combine social communications and location information, making them visible on a map.

Most mobile social networks, on GPS phones at least, put geo-labels on everything you do. FriendFeed just recently started adding Google maps for any messages that contain location information, and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle makes it easy for other services to add their own geo-location layer.

Geo-coded communications are becoming more and more common, and this is just the start. I like to complain about the increased noise level that lifestreaming services are bringing into our lives. While that continues to be a growing problem on an individual basis for people who want to tune in and use these services (“You’re at the bus stop? Great. Keep those Tweets coming.”), on an aggregate level all the seemingly useless drivel has the potential to become useful meta-data.

And this is not limited to GPS-enabled services. You can tag Tweets, for instance, with hashmark codes that act as tags for places and things (“#bus-stop”, “#centralpark”). All of these messages get dumped into databases on the Web, which are then searchable. And that is where things get interesting. Chris Brogan explains in a post titled “Secrets of the Annotated World”:

Services like Twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and more are hosting conversations around you that might be of value to you. . . . If you’re not using services like Yelp and BrightKite, (and you could name several others), you’re missing some of the glyphs and warnings we’re leaving on the landscape to tell you about the way things are versus the way things are marketed. You’re missing chance encounters. You’re missing stray opportunities.

Again, you don’t have to get involved. It’s just that we are, and we’re passing many more notes than you can imagine.

I am glad there are people out there like Chris who are obsessive about geo-coding everything they do. They are like the early taggers, the two percent or so of people on Flickr, Delicious, and other services who did all the heavy lifting of organizing and categorizing all the data that was dumped into them. The more that data can be sliced and diced, the more useful it becomes. And location data is particularly valuable because it relates to places, people, and events in the real world.

Every geo-coded Tweet, Flickr photo, or restaurant review is adding a tag or comment to the world that is then searchable by others. It is what will make visions like Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera a reality. It is why Fotonauts, an upcoming photo app that launched at TC50, makes it easy to geo-tag every photo in an album via Google Maps or Wikipedia. Everything in the world will be tagged. But it is such a huge task that the only way to do it is if we all pitch in. (Or at least if Chris and his friends pitch in—the rest of us can freeload).

To show your location, the Friend View application is using the built-in GPS or the network if there is no signal available (you can also set your location manually). When you turn on Friend View, it locates you as an avatar on a map and shows you all your friends as well. Whenever you send a micro-message, it appears as a word balloon on the map, and you can get a quick overview of what’s going on with your friends with the ‘What’s Up’ feature.

Stefan Constantinescu from Nokia Corporate Strategy shares more about the new feature, which is currently in development:

Our friends over at ArcticStartup reviewed the software and were left unimpressed:

I’m not blown away, nor have I completely lost hope with Nokia. They are trying fairly hard. The service is very Nokia-like in that it’s not very user friendly compared to some others that have emerged from the west coast of US. The UI is rather ugly and after you start using it feels that someone has designed it on paper, but never really used it herself as it’s not logical all the way through. Similarly the service is still very buggy, not loading the map on the web browser, eating one’s battery in no time …the list goes on and has still some really retarded features like the fact that the nick name is case sensitive.

AllAboutSymbian also wrote up a review and has more screenshots.

At first, we thought this had something to do with Nokia’s acquisition of location-based service Plazes earlier this year, but peculiarly the Plazes team released a mobile version of their own just yesterday which looks like an entirely different thing than Friend View.

Maybe the two teams should talk to one another. I hear Nokia has this new app in development called Friend View that lets you keep up with what your friends are doing.

We most recently wrote about Plazes new iPhone application in May 2008, which will take advantage of the cutting edge location technologies available on the phone (cell triangulation and GPS). The company has raised a total of €3.7 million in venture financing over two round, although the last round was closed in February 2007.

This is the second “mobile social network” in Europe to be acquired in as many months – Danish startup ZYB was acquired by Vodafone in May for €31.5 million.

Co-founder Felix Petersen told me in a hastily scheduled phone call that the company will maintain its Berlin office and all thirteen employees. The Plazes product will become Nokia’s Services & Software unit.

In 2006 Nokia acquired Berlin based Gate5 for a rumored $250 million and turned the product into Nokia Maps, which is deployed in 300 markets. Petersen says the success of that acquisition gave Plazes a lot of comfort in working with Nokia.

As a funny aside, a year ago Petersen was busted by his own product as he avoided one conference to attend another.

Update: by Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK: My industry sources are telling me that this was a smart acquisition for Nokia, which needed to have a consumer based offering outside the rigid maps infrastructure they have, since the purchase last year of Navteq.

There is also a local story here. The Plazes office is in Berlin, physically close to the Gate 5 people, and we know from good authority that Gate 5 people are highly respected on the Berlin scene. It’s therefore likely that they had a lot to do with the acquisition thinking inside Nokia as they know the guys from Plazes.

From what we know about Nokia, the purchase of Plazes fits in with their strategy in terms of context and location and what to do with it. Put together the Ad system they have, and they control a strong section of the mobile ecosystem from ad generation, delivery through branded channels, with good profile information about the user, especially since most new handsets from Nokia now have GPS built in.

Today Plazes CEO Felix Petersen gave us a peek at iPlazer, the upcoming iPhone client for the geo-tagging social networking site. The app will be available when Apple’s official App Store launches in mid June. Plazes has been around for a while – it was one of the first companies to be covered on TechCrunch. Since then it has switched gears a couple of times, but it’s best described as Twitter with geotagging, points of interest, and social networking features.

Right now iPlazer seems like a combination of Twitter and Dopplr. The phone detects the user’s location through the iPhone API, then presents the user with a number of suggested descriptions (for example, opening Plazes from our office presented us with choices of “TechCrunch HQ” and “The Mansion”, both of which were assigned to the coordinates by previous visitors).

After choosing a location label, the user is prompted to send “activity” messages to their friends (it’s basically a tweet tagged with location information). These activity messages are compared by the server, and Plazes notifies you if you’re in the same neighborhood as one of your friends. You can get a feel for the app in the screencast below.

Plazes is also launching a new version of their main site, which will enter private beta next week. Most notable about the launch is the introduction of Twitter integration, which is strange because Plazes seems to mimic Twitter in some ways. For the time being Plazes stands to gain by allowing Twitter users to send geo-tagged tweets, but things may work out differently in the long term. The new version of the site also introduces a Dopplr-esque nearby friend notification system and support for iCal integration. You can request an invite here.

Readers may remember Felix Petersen as the guy who got busted by his own product. Petersen backed out of a speaking gig at a conference, telling them that one of his kids was sick, then proceeded to party at a different event (while Plazes told the world). The whole thing was overblown, but it was amusing nonetheless.

The problem, though, is that Peterson didn’t stay home to work on their product and take care of his daughter. He was actually attending a competing conference, Reboot, in Copenhagen.

How was this discovered? The Next Web guys used Petersen’s own Plazes, a service which shows where users are at any given time. Peterson’s Plazes account clearly showed him in Copenhagen at Reboot on June 1, drinking wine and beer, listening to music, and enjoying “incredible conversations.” “Reboot just rocks,” he writes.

Needless to say the Next Web guys were somewhat offended. And they outed Peterson in a big way today. Next Web co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten wrote about the whole incident on his personal blog. He writes:

Ok, Reboot seems to rock after some dinner, beer and wine. Great. The amazing thing is not that Felix would rather go to Reboot. I respect that. The amazing thing is that someone would lie about the health of his children to be able to drink beer at another conference and then assume that no one would find out.

I have an email in to Peterson for his side of the story. No word back yet.

Update: Felix Petersen writes:

I must say I´m really confused by the commotion. My kid was sick on Tursday and it wasn´t entirely clear wether I could attend thenextweb the next day. In addition did we have some issues with the new Plazer (http://blog.plazes.com/?p=157#comments) and Stefan, my co-founder was coming to Reboot on Friday. So for professional and personal issues I decided to cancel since I wasn´t sure at that point that I could make it. Boris forgot to mention the last part of my email:

“And to be fair to you guys I rather cancel now than trying until the last minute and then not being able to come afterall.”

So I can´t really see what the commotion is about.

Best,
Felix

I actually don’t care that much about the specifics – I think it’s fascinating that Plazes can and is being used to check up on people, though, to see if they are being honest about their whereabouts.

Plazes lets users tell others where they are and what they are up to. Currently, users have to download software which auto-determines user location based on IP address, network IDs from routers and other information and then places you on the Plazes map. If it was a location no Plazes member had visited before, you could name and describe the place and add Flickr photos. As good as Plazes was, the friction from requiring users to download software and use it whenever they changed location created friction and slowed user growth. Taking pointers from the simplicity of Twitter, Plazes is changing the way it handles location, and is also adding time and activity dimensions to the product.

The new features roll out next week. The client software will no longer be required to set location. Instead, users can simply add a place via a Google maps mashup (and are helped along the way with a suggestion mechanism), and can also say whether they were there in the past, will be there in the future, or are there currently. Users can also say what they are up to, a very Twitter-like activity. Users can give Plazes this data via the Plazes website, the client software or by texting it in via a mobile device. An instant messaging interface is coming soon.
The new version will also preserve a user’s update history and allow them to post locations for the future, allowing you to plan, or chance encounters. The timeline will also allow your friends to get a comprehensive look at where and when you hang out.

Friends can subscribe to people or places and see a data stream from that source. Groups can also be formed that include both people and places, and the feed information shows what those people are up to when they are at selected locations.

250 of Plazes 50,000 members will get access to the update before next week. Plazes draws a crowd that is 60% from the U.S., with the remaining mostly European.

Plazes is clearly trying to lower the participation hurdles to get more users and more participation from existing users. The product will be significantly easier to use, and adding the activity information means users are likely to update far more often than just when they change locations.

Hype vs. Hesitate
Just as this week’s Pew Internet Study stirred a debate on the view of Web 2.0 in the US, Germany has seen similar arguments on the size of the phenomenon locally. For a long time, several indicators had hinted that Germany was falling behind in broadband penetration compared to other European countries like Sweden or Norway. But a recent OECD study painted a very different picture: looking at the total number of households (as opposed to per-capita penetration), Germany comes out on top in Europe with 14.1 million subscribers in December 2006 (followed by the UK at 12.9 and France at 12.7 million). So the crowds are here, but where can they go?

“Web 2.0” is a term that brilliantly translates around the world, but many of the sites that are commonly associated with it have a language barrier for international audiences (take MySpace for example: it officially launched its German version only in March of this year).

While English certainly isn’t foreign to Germans, it has still slowed their adoption – and network effects, which have been a driving force, are often tied to language and reach as well. What’s been the consequence in Deutschland? A mushrooming of German copycats that have localized and copied their US role models, sometimes down to the last pixel.

Copy/Paste Innovation
Whether you’re looking for social bookmarking, photo sharing, video posting or a college social network, Germany’s clever entrepreneurs have done the translation for you and some even fared quite well.

The best example by far is StudiVZ, whose name stands for “student directory.” Launched in October 2005, it now claims to house 2.1 million users. Despite a myriad of security problems and controversies, new users kept coming in, which only speaks to the universally strong demand for such networks among students. In January of this year, Germany had its mini-YouTube moment when StudiVZ sold for €85M ($100M) to the German media conglomerate Holtzbrinck Group.

If the screenshots look familiar, you won’t be surprised to hear that StudiVZ’s early versions of the site were using filenames like fbook.css or poke.php. (Facebook was in talks with StudiVZ but it walked away because of scalability and security concerns about the platform. Instead, Facebook is now working on its own strategy – let the battle begin).

Another success story is Xing (formerly OpenBC), a professional network like LinkedIn. In December 2006, it became the first Web 2.0 company to go public and is now traded at the Frankfurt stock exchange. Xing’s rapid growth among the German business community came rather unexpected after it launched in November 2003, especially in a country that isn’t typically known for its culture of business networking. The site now boasts 2 million members and about 13% of its users pay for a monthly premium subscription of €5.95. With revenues of €10 million in 2006, Xing’s performance at the stock market has been somewhat lackluster and the real test for the company will come as both Xing and LinkedIn expand beyond their original markets (LinkedIn now has 9 million registered users and $10 million in 2006 revenues; it recently raised $13 million more).

The Brighter Side: What’s next
Of course there are creative and innovative startups to be found (and growing any multi-million user base is a feat in itself regardless). For some inspiration, take a look at our previous coverage of Plazes (currently a sponsor) and SellABand; last week also saw the launch of MindMeister, a promising online mind mapping collaboration tool. Other notable services include blauarbeit.de, a growing reverse-auction site for jobs and services, and we have yet to wait for a successful US counterpart.

In short: Germany is buzzed right now and the biggest question for the startup scene is how the many look-alikes will develop over the next year. You’ll often hear that investors are hesitant to invest in ideas that “haven’t been proven in the US yet” but there are several other factors at work here: Germany is generally more risk-averse, the bureaucracy is more cumbersome, and entrepreneurial networks like Silicon Valley aren’t as strongly developed.

Nonetheless, the country’s business angels and media conglomerates (Holtzbrinck Group, Burda, Axel Springer) are eager to invest with rapid-fire pace at the moment but the majority of German internet users have yet to be convinced that there is a land beyond eBay, Google, Wikipedia and some online news sites.

Meanwhile, German and other European startups are in a prime position to tinker with mobile applications and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more innovation in this space soon. The continent is covered with advanced data networks and the UK has already seen the introduction of flat-rate data plans at reasonable prices. Germany’s market is sure to follow and the boon of the mobile web will start in Asia and Europe sooner than in the US. You also want to watch out for innovations around IPTV as subscriptions are expected to reach 2.6 million in Germany alone by 2010.

Until then, let’s see how Facebook and StudiVZ duke it out

Curious fact: Google’s market share for search is near 92% in Germany. And yes, it’s a verb here, too.

Gregor Hochmuth is an analyst and entrepreneur in residence at Hasso Plattner Ventures. He runs zoo-m.com and his own homepage at dotgrex.com.

We first profiled Plazes on June 11, 2005 (the day this blog started). It’s evolved significantly since then, obviously, but the core idea is the same – Plazes tracks your physical location and shows you other Plazes users and places nearby. Plazes also integrates with Skype, has a widget to place on websites that shows your current location and other information, and a SMS service to find out the current location of your Plazes friends.

I spoke with founder Felix Petersen earlier this evening. He says Plazes continues to see “strong growth” and has 40,000 active users currently. Those users are “predominantly users from the US (40%), followed by Germany, UK, Netherlands, Canada and Switzerland.” A thousand or so users are online at any given time.

What is it?

Plazes made an announcement at Reboot 7.0 in Copenhagen on June 10, 2005, although the service has been around since at least January.

In their own words, “Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free.”

To gain full functionality, you must install a 1.11 mb file on your computer. I did this, and it had trouble syncing with my router. I’m not surprised, since my internet connection is down and I am currently “borrowing” wifi from one of my neighbors. Anyway, I was able to logon and create my very own plaze in Manhattan Beach, California (see the third screen shot below).

This is a very useful application, and I can see using it to find friends and meet new people. The design is well thought out and the social networking tools are as good as we’ve seen.

As their blog indicates, the product is still in beta mode and functionality is being added continuously.

Service Features:

- Discover Plazes anywhere in the world – like hotspots, restaurants, offices, based on search or your current location.

- Hook up with people nearby – see people (and their “metadata”) who are online and near a “plaze”. Message with them.

- Stay in touch with your friends – Plazes has social networking tools like invite, messaging, status, karma etc. Friends can see your currentl location (or keep yourself invisible)

Screen Shots:

People Involved:

Felix Petersen
“Stefan“

Relevant Links:

What’s Plazes?
Plazes FAQs
Plazes Blog
Felix Petersen Blog
Plazes Merchandise
Robert Scoble on Plazes
Christian Heindel on Plazes